Things Handwritten

In the past one or two weeks or so, I have been posting pics of what I have found during my spring cleaning (it is spring and summer all year long here) of the office as my retirement is just around the corner. The things that I have found is my handwritten notes for two courses that I have taught in my early years of teaching. The following pic is for Classical Mechanics.

There are two parts to this course: the first is simply Newtonian mechanics and the second being Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics. For Newtonian mechanics, I have already introduced index notation for matrices (tensors) and vectors as well as use of curvilinear coordinates. This helps differentiate the level of Newtonian mechanics in earlier courses.

My main course when I started teaching was quantum mechanics (QM). The following pic is my notes for QM (which I have already brought home quite earlier on).

At the time, there was another which handles more of the physics part, which is atomic & nuclear physics (later turned into atomic & molecular physics, I think). So the QM course focuses on the mathematical formalism.

Some observations are due here: 

1. They are both taught in Malay language. We only start to teach in English in 2004 as we open our undergraduate programmes to international students. I was told that students got surprised about me teaching in Malay. Perhaps, they pictured me as an anglophile. For me, no matter what language we are supposed to teach in, we must be good in the language itself to get the points across.
2. They are both handwritten. Note that in the 1990s, not everyone has a computer. I believe I bought my first computer only years later (a 386 running MS-DOS). I used to be computer-phobic. Even when my PhD supervisor asked whether I would like to do computational work or mathematical, I replied the latter. Also, I used to love writing notes with a fountain pen, following my PhD supervisor. As fountain pen and their ink becomes difficult to get, only then I turn to ball pens.

Indeed, earlier before my PhD (before seeing the beauty of the black fat ink), all my notes for my BSc and Part III courses are written with ball pen. I also uploaded the pics of the notes from these courses. Below is the pic for my BSc notes.

 The ones for Part III are shown below.

You probably see my notes for Part III are neater. This is because they have been rewritten from the scribbled notes taken during lectures. I need to do this because Part III is a tough course and I need to be my very best (though most are better than me especially those who have already taken Part I and II for their BSc - will return to this in a future post). A closer look here with my notes on supersymmetry and supergravity, taught by Paul Townsend.

By rewriting the notes, I will be able to understand better - writing out more details and in some cases, detailing out proofs (see the one in pencil). Even my Part III dissertation/essay (on Witten index) was all submitted in handwriting (see below).

I will say more on this when I blog about my Part III experience, God willing. My B.Sc. Thesis (on Minimal SU(5), Modifications and Related Topics) was also handwritten, but I could not find the copy I had at the moment.

Apart from these, I also did another crazy thing; I copied in handwriting some out-of-print books that I can find during my graduate days. Here's an example.

And also from today, I found Kostant's lecture notes (also copied in handwriting), which I have misplaced in some old file (alongside an instruction manual of a book project that never got realised - was waiting the contributions of others).

By copying them in handwriting, I get to read the 'books' and understand the main ideas. Besides, it also help me experience what the ancient scribes are doing. The file that Kostant's notes was placed in is a file containing our theoretical physics lab when it was first realised (including incomplete or unrealised projects).

I should also say that I found back my copy of John Stuart Dowker's rare lecture notes on Selected Topics in Topology and Quantum Field Theory. This was given to me directly from the author using snail mail on my request. It even had his scribbles on it.

After all these posts, someone commented to me how neat they were (after they are rewritten). I did not think much about my handwriting all this while. I do remember some of my teachers had commented the same. I remembered an incident during my primary school (Year 3 or 4, I believe), a teacher (Mr. Perumal) had asked me to help out after school in writing things without telling my parents. As soon as I reached home, my mum sprinkled rice on me out of some local traditions of avoiding misfortunes. Also, my handwriting does not quite correlate with my art abilities (I can draw but not that well). Perhaps, it was the early handwriting training in our early years of primary school (now these exercises seems to be transferred to kindergartens). The other thing that I do remember is that we were taught cursive writing, which I think they are no longer taught (at least not that I know of) and cursive writing has become obscure. Today, writing are much replaced by hitting keys on the keyboards and that makes handwriting become more of a lost art. I do wish that it can be resurrected voluntarily by the students themselves - not added as a further burden to the existing already heavy schoolwork.